sales training that sucks 5 ways using

What passes for sales training in many selling organizations is hardly a laughing matter. Ask any business leader or executive what the most important part of his or her business happens to be, and they'll say "my people". But when you look into how little time, money and attention they invest into their training and development process, you'll be left with a much different impression.Far too many sales managers and business owners believe that they cannot afford to set aside the time or the money to get their sales representatives deeply and rigorously trained in a manner that is customized for their organization's needs.Instead, they send newbies on half-backed orientation sessions, stik a bunch of binders in their hands, and sending them out on "ride-alongs" with senior salespeople (internal selling mentors). While this may work here and there, the occasional success of this method when implemented alone has as much to do with dumb luck as with anything else.The Downside of Relying Mainly On Internal Selling Mentors For Sales TrainingIn a large sales organization, there may be as much as a 2100% gap in productivity between the top performer and the bottom seller. This wide range of variation in productivity means that sales managers usually pick out the top performers to be the "victim" of a sub-par mentoring process.Here are a few reasons why internal sales mentoring should never be relied on as a substitute for a more robust sales training system.1. Without special preparation, and with no special incentive for doing something that could potentially interfere with their own productivity, many of these top performers come to resent what should be a profitable and practical team-building (and business-building) process.2. Instead of a systematic process for capturing the knowledge, behavior and attitudes of the best performers, and then sharing it with the whole sales organization, this information is inefficiently dispersed one-on-one. The organization loses out on the aggregate power of this transfer of intellectual capital.3. Bad sales habits of the hapless "trainer for a day" may get passed on to an impressionable sales trainee during these unguided "sales training" sessions in a way that is damaging to the long-term success of the trainee.4. Many average or under-performing salespeople end up being assigned to mentor the new staff member because the top performers refuse to dent their productivity by doing a task for which they are unsuited and untrained.5. Training business development professionals in this way is potentially disastrous for overall production because different trainees get exposure to different training. Such a system is not duplicable or systematic, and therefore cannot be incrementally improved over the long haul. It is not improvable... so when a problem arises, no sale manager, executive or consultant can fix the system. It will have to be replaced wholesale - from planning, to scripting, to behavior.ConclusionI am not against using more experienced sales professionals in your organization as selling mentors. However, this cannot take the place of a robust and systematic sales training process.The most effective sales training systems are customized to the needs of your organization. They are built from the ground up to acknowledge the realities facing your business and your sales professionals when they knock on the doors of prospects. Such sales systems are integrated and into metric-based sales management systems so that you can improve on behaviors rather than relying on empty rhetoric (or even insults) to motivate.

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